Cassandra Voices

Tag: o’neill

  • Poetry: Peter O’Neill

    The Bridge
    After Meryon

    Bridge of Be-ing, all arches mirrrored upon
    The river running – Heraclitean ;
    Looming above… turret trumpeting,
    All Barnonial excess, pure 19th century.

    And aligned in sheer proximity the great monolith
    Of glass and concrete, its emphasis
    Presenting a sheer 20th century existentialism.
    Seen from the quays, it’s pure Baudelaire!

    The candelabara of Street lamps whose
    Illuminating auras burnish the passerby
    Ghosting them with their luminance, and lustre.

    Fate drops like a Stone in the water
    Troubling the stillness with ripples outward,
    And whose faces Flow forever onward into the Dark Pool.

     

     

    Heidegger’s Dasein 

    There is a philosophy born of storm to encompass Be-ing,
    And it assails in the tumult of the unending assault of the days.
    To storm troop on and over into the assailment of the heavens;
    God forbid, what is left of them those splintering fragments!

    As in the woodwinds onrushing conducive to the Heart-fires
    Still governing, just about, out from the holocaust of Thought.
    Essence at the forefront of being, attuning to the tumult
    Of the Sway, like anyone finding their ground.

    Such as the down and outs rolled up in sleeping bags
    On the public benches on the boardwalk,
    Those pupae, or premature mummies,

    Whose alarm clock would be police siren,
    Heineken clock and other hallucinatory prey,
    And whose breakfast would be coloured by the sweet aroma of Hashish!

     

    Gothic Landscape 

    Thought’s colour broodingly bleeds through to the skull,
    Seeped to pour and stream into the brain.
    The bridge is moored there through its anchor
    Above the liquified riverbed afflux.

    The skeletal fragments of a backdrop,
    Etched architecture of a Gothic replica.
    Its organic structure today looms out of the fog
    Which to the stoner is a mesmeric enterprise to induce Funk!

    Through the viral air of a city masked,
    Its denizens the very harbingers of their own Hell,
    Introduces the notion of Dantean comeuppance.

    Tramping along on Bachelor’s Walk,
    Crossing the widened Carlisle over Gandon’s hump,
    Only to reach Eden – the irony sits well.

     

    Roman Noir
    “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
    Raymond Chandler
    For
    Daniel Wade

    John A. Maher, Private Detective, peered out
    The window of the fourth floor of Lafayette,
    His vantage point on par with a Gargoyle!
    The river split the city like a fissure, before him.

    It was a city divided by accent and money.
    On the northside, speech was contracted to the point
    Of almost unintelligibility, which he liked
    Never quite trusting language himself.

    While on the south, it was all accent darling,
    Barring the odd enclave. Maher moves through it all
    Monosyllabic, stony-faced and with mild amusement.

    Humans are weak creatures, so prone to error.
    And some are driven to crime; one needs a hard fist,
    Copious amounts of alcohol, and a certain penchant for metaphysics!

    Feature Image: Lafayette House and O’Connell Bridge © Peter O’Neill

  • Poetry: Peter O’Neill

    Irish Rail

    Dublin, that old whore, with her piss -stained pavements
    Abruptly transforms into a woman of a certain station.
    Such are the, at once, brutal and subtle shifts where
    In an instant, Hell aligns in an altogether strict

    Congruence… Like when you climb aboard
    The final commuter train of the week on a Friday
    Evening on Platform One at Pearse Station.
    And, as the train finally pulls out, leaving

    Behind her the contents of a working week,
    Passing images are reflected back to you
    Through the compartment windows, revealing

    Dune and marram at Portmarnock, to a passing
    Lagoon at Malahide, and then the panoply of imagery
    Miraculously washes away all of the whoredom from your mind.

     

    The Great Burnishment

    Your Pirelli calendar moment must last, at least, twenty score years;
    Nobody makes this very important point entirely clear.
    So, try to remember, while cavorting in the Sun,
    That the memories must endure, and for everyone!

    Call it, if you will, the great Burnishment.
    When like two figures from a fabled myth or play,
    You roam the most remote shores and the very
    Earth appears made for you both alone.

    It is the cliché – you look on her then and on those mythic shores –
    With the aroma of wild rosemary, myrtle and Goat;
    Desire bears you both ever onward with its emblazoned sail.

    Fast forward two decades now and she stands before you in your kitchen,
    And the initial violence of the sun from that first day,
    Tell me, do you still feel its impact burning your skin?

     

    The Flies 

    The two house- flies, Beckett and Joyce, buzz about you
    And the TV screen. There they land, buzz again
    Before flying off to Memphis copulating
    And multiplying on the wing. As a sign of virility,

    The Egyptians displayed them on their amulets.
    That great race, unlike our own, had a great respect for insects!
    Even the Greeks showed a similar respect,
    When having a BBQ they offered a sacrifice to Shoo Fly Zeus.

    The crabby meat men, in this way, could eat their own
    Undisturbed by patrolling swarms and Oxen that had fallen
    Were replaced by Lotus Eater, and burning eucalyptus in the Sun.

    Now, you look at the books of both these modern sages
    That you have been reading for an eternity,
    And still you hear the flies buzzing across the pages!

     

    The Vico Road

    From the vantage point of Strawberry Hill,
    A Victorian Villa recently selling for a cool 5 million,
    A place more evocative of Raymond Chandler
    Than anything remotely Irish. I am reminded,

    Again, of the Neapolitan philosopher who
    Peopled his New Science with giants. In fact,
    While lunching there on one of the picnic tables,
    I had a slightly hallucinatory vision of Gulliver

    Striding in 18th century breeches, and croppy hair
    Over the Sugar- Loaf Mountain, while
    The Lilliputians below discussed the ongoing

    Business in the property sector: vulture funds
    And NAMA; hedge funds in Texas,
    Where the multi-headed Cereberus roars.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Poetry: Peter O’Neill

    Poems in the Manner of the Devil
    After Alexandar Ristović
    (1933-1994)

    If you can’t chew on oxtail, eat knuckles instead.
    The bounty of bedlam,
    Let these crumbs be your Thanksgiving,
    Or Last Suppers.
    Imitation is always the greatest form of flattery.
    See the world now through the light of wine.

    Do you have confidence in the morning?
    Do you have faith in toast?
    Each morning, do you spread marmalade
    Under the clouds in the sky?

    Here, drink this little cup of coffee.
    Taste the bitterness brewed in countless suns
    And raise your little finger, subconsciously,
    To honour the martyrdom of little buns.

    These trees that surround you,
    Why do there branches rise like accusatory fingers
    Holding peaches up to the clouds?
    Where have all the flamingos flown?
    Into the jaws of baboons in hell.

    Columns, arches… shit!
    Commerce herself is dizzied by the sun.

    But know also this,
    That within all of this madness
    There is one alone who sleeps quietly
    Nestled in dreams like a bird
    And she dreams of housing owls
    While presiding over countless committees.

     

    Break  Fast 

    The table- cloth was a souvenir from Turkey.
    It had a very simple olive pattern,
    The kind you might find in a good café
    Or restaurant where the meals were affordable.
    The kind you might find your hands floating over
    Stirring spoons of sugar or lifting glasses
    And bottles of water and wine, picking up bread
    And paper napkins or surely raising to take out
    Bank cards, in order to settle the bill.
    In order to settle the bill.

    Hardly is this last phrase out and everything,
    The whole panoply of artifacts,
    Suddenly is in freefall before you,
    Like that last joke you heard before leaving.

     

    The Familiar  

    Don’t talk to me about storms in teacups,
    Speak rather about the dervish in your espresso.
    For your idioms and metaphor are tired,
    As tired as my crocs worn out from pacing
    Over the same old living space. Here, then,
    Is where I dwell in both the word and the poem.
    And, in memory! The ontological shifts
    Which we must surely feel as much as the pedal
    Pressing down on the pianoforte, sustaining the SOUND
    The words vibrating, each particular element,
    Each particular word, key, shape or movement
    Given the proper attention it deserves.
    Such is modality. Yes, I would speak to you of modality,
    And the ontological shifts in taking a coffee!

    Janus  

     I will Putinize you, you know what I mean!
    As I think it say it my reptilian eyes roll over
    Blocking out momentarily the carrion tinted sun.
    For, each encounter is a potential existential threat.

    So, I repeat it again as I move closer to you
    Physically and you will have the opportunity
    Of understanding what it is I am now telling you again.
    If you do Not do as I ask, I will Putinize you!

    Putinize – a verb designated to describe
    The systematic annihilation of either a person,
    A place, an animal or a thing so that the object

    Is no longer physically recognisable anymore.
    Just as the city will be left in rubble, the person
    Will no longer be recognisable instead left lifeless; like himself.

    Kyiv 

    After the heroic age there are only two options remaining,
    for hatred can only burn for so long before eventually capitulating
    to either madness or so- called reason.

  • Poetry: Peter O’Neill

    Spring
    For
    Lois P. Jones  

    I

    The gentle discord of rainfall,
    its alternating static dance are
    Reeds of air in suspension
    before the corona of sensation.
    A droplet splashes and trickles
    along your neck,
    its joyous grief
    is welcomed by you with a shudder.
    The courage of the leaf
    passes beneath the banks of cloud,
    the burnishing lustre blossoming
    upon your limbs,
    the flowering sounds
    of the sun’s brassy trumpets
    illuminate the oracle of the hills.

    II 

    The space between the words
    Is akin to the space between the rain;
    This is syntax –
    The syntax of the rain.
    Each word, each drop,
    With its cohesion of letters
    Is an alphabet written in water
    Pooling in language.
    The liquidity of words.
     Your waters fall like rain,
    Their quiet sudden declensions thunder
    With an astonishment of showers
    Light and gentle as thought’s forgotten tributaries
    Brining relief from the tropics,
    The tropics of the spring.

    III 

    The distillation of the night
    ferments the dawn,
    minute revolutions of uninterrupted
    sleep; night being a dark day
    for things that silently creep.
    Out of such stuff things bloom!
    The leaf of thought could fill a room
    With the bestiaries of the night.`

    IV 

    Upon the crest you cycle
    With the Black Hills as register.
    Sheepless and quiet.
    The dissemination of clouds
    Pass, yet you are the only witness
    To such wonder.
    Accompanying all with aural springs
    Cadence and rhythm pick up
    With the invigoration of muscle.
    Thought’s labour on the passing of the evening
    Still clinging to the web of sleep
    Like the silken trail of a woman’s stocking,
    While banking on your side
    Sheer locomotion shunts
    Fabulously across the morning.
    A thousand hermaphrodites
    Lie slain and severed upon the heath,
    Yet not a sole is being recorded.
    While placed religiously upon the library shelves,
    A hundred almanacs of the tides!

    V 

    Along the footpaths, trees stand erect
    As arrows, Virgilian sentinels
    To patrol the fingerless dawn.
    Wisps of Rose.
    Cotton fields upended.
    The fields are aliens reflected
    In the lagoons filled with
    The mythology of both Roman and Norsemen.
    Out by Lambay their ghost’s hover.
    Fingal’s cave but a haven for 19th century
    Smuggler.
    There is ruin and mail under the watery skin
    Of every wave. Gut its belly,
    Debone and scale the morning.
    The electric prophets prophecy nothing.
    Mendacity is cultural.
    Aural pollution is on the wing.
    Emissaries of the void would but spill.
    Frustrate them.
    Offer other flavours of the evening.
    The evenings where shapes still bring
    Mythologies as finely wrought
    As summer dresses
    Garlanding the superb limbs
    Of the approaching Amazons.
    See there!
    Now, they come…

    VI. 

    The elemental walk of the Vitruvians,
    Divinely proportioned,
    Aqueous folds cocooned in the lithe
    Expansive limbs of the morning.
    Flesh burnished by a billion suns,
    Atomised to the core; Bataille’s erotic
    Solar economics beats all Keynesian excess.
    Even pedestrian they Kill, for She is slow.
    Her cadence and rhythm shift in shapes
    Of undulating, mesmerising patterns.
    You follow her like a servant, reciting some lost phrase,
    Bringing to her the garlands of the morning.

  • Musician of the Month: Ellie O’Neill

    I’ve never needed a reason to write a song. There have never been any conscious considerations of failure or success during the process. If anything, I can say that what I discover through writing is that there are endless landscapes of discovery. This feeling has not changed in the eleven years I’ve been writing and playing music, but it has definitely been challenged many times by different circumstances, by frustration and impatience.

    The first few months of the pandemic were some of the most challenging of times of my life in so many respects, but in particular, to overcome creative blocks of all kinds. I’ve read and heard similar sentiments from artists in all disciplines, from all over the world. Out of necessity I had to find new pathways through the distraction and despair that were surrounding the drive to write.

    https://soundcloud.com/ellieoneillmusic/half-immune

    During the second lockdown, around September, I read Carmen Maria Machado’s book In The Dream House for the first time. It was a graduation gift from my friend Molly. It’s so rare to happen upon a book, or any somewhat mainstream art really, about which you have no preconceived notions.

    I’d somehow never seen it talked about online or even heard about it from friends. It turned out to be a life changing experience for me for many reasons, one of which was Machado’s capacity for searingly honest storytelling.

    She quotes Dorothy Allison at the beginning of chapter five: ‘Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.’

    Molly giving me the book was an act of love; my reading of it through to the end was an act of self-love. Beginning to think about telling your story in this way opened avenues for me in my own writing that had been heavily blocked, long before the lockdowns.

    But in terms of attempting to write in pandemic times, it allowed me to exhale into the situation, rather than instinctively turn a blind eye and try to write as if it had never happened; like it wasn’t happening right now.

    I suppose I struggled with the situation of wanting and needing to write but being unable to do so truthfully, without noticeable inflections of isolation or disease or separation permeating the language and the music.

    Viewing acceptance of the current situation as an act of love allowed me to begin writing again, a couple of months into the pandemic, and to allow these inflections to come, marking my ideas and words and notes, and accepting them as realities in the moment of writing. So, a form of acceptance came and settled in, and I slowly started to come out of shock and into writing mode.

    In an online workshop I took with guitarist and songwriter Buck Meek last month, he referred to his own periods of inspiration or prolifigacy as ‘seasons’ of writing. This resonated deeply with me as a metaphor for those couple of weeks at a time where creativity is flowing: working when there’s no mining to be done, because it’s all there on the surface, ready. These seasons come in cycles, and they bring with them their own unique collection of senses, words and thought processes.

    For me, this most recent season has been rife with images of birds, pyramids, wild animals and the cold sea. These are related to finding comfort, it would seem, in thoughts of flight and weightlessness, of ancient beauty, and again, of natural cycles twinned with wild unpredictability. This is what I’ve been observing, I think, most consciously in the past year: a stillness or stuckness; the prospect of infinite lockdowns and days seeming to repeat themselves; coupled with the unstoppable force of everything around me changing in both minute and massive ways, all the time.

    https://soundcloud.com/ellieoneillmusic/anna

    The pandemic afforded me the privilege to slow down enough to actively watch the physical seasons of the year changing. I had the chance to feel the day it became too cold to swim for more than five minutes, and the day it finally warmed up again. Leaning into the fact that the seasons will return, renewed each time, has been deeply comforting; where I used to deny myself the right to repeat ideas or phrases or even chord progressions I instead began to lean into it, to try and see why they kept raising their heads. I’m beginning to remember that each new season will bring all new types of light and shade.

    It’s been liberating also, to return to writing lyrics in the present tense about things from the past. The movement and immediacy of it has been like stretching out of the confinement of the days, a vibration that helps dissolve the walls of stuckness. Dredging up old stories you thought you were finished with feels nostalgic and sticky and whiny sometimes, but exploring them in the present tense makes them become  dreamlike and fluid.

    It’s been almost a way of travelling, for me, during this time of sudden and intense constrainment. Back to Montreal, back to Cork, back to when Dublin city didn’t feel completely empty. Time becomes irrelevant in this merging of tenses, if only to the writer, but that’s the  liberation. After all, I am the first person I’m trying to communicate with, through all of it.

    Feature image: Jeanne Castegnier-Mainville

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    Image Jeanne Castegnier-Mainville